The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907

The Agrarian Programmes of the R.S.D.L.P. and Their
    Test in the First Revolution

Letus pass to an examination of the Social-Democratic agrarian programme. I
outlined the chief historical stages in the evolution of the views of Russian
Social-Democrats on the agrarian question in the first section of the pamphletRevision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers’

			      Party[1]We must explain more fully the nature of the mistake contained in the
previous agrarian programmes of Russian Social-Democracy, i. e., in the
programmes of 1885 and 1903.

1. What Was the Mistake in the Previous Agrarian
       Programmes of Russian Social-Democracy?

Inthe draft issued by the Emancipation of Labour group in 1885, the agrarian
programme was outlined as follows:

“A radical revision of our agrarian relations, i. e., of the terms on which
the land is to be redeemed and allotted to the peasant communities. The right to
refuse their allotmentsand to leave the commune to be granted to those peasants who may find it
advantageous to do so, etc.”

Thatis all. The error of that programme is not that its principles or partial
demands were wrong. No. Its principles are correct, while the only partial
demand it puts forward (the right to refuse allotments) is so incontestable that
it has now been carried out by Stolypin’s peculiar legislation. The error
of that programme is its abstract character, the absence of any concrete view of
the subject. Properly speaking, it is not a programme, but a Marxist declaration
in the most general terms. Of course, it would he absurd to put the blame for
this mistake on the authors of the programme, who for the first time laid down
certain principles long before the formation of a workers’ party. On the
contrary, it should be particularly emphasised that in that programme the
inevitability of a “radical revision” of the Peasant Reform was
recognised twenty years before the Russian revolution.

Theoreticallythat programme should have been developed by clarifying the
economic basis of our agrarian programme, the facts upon which the demand for aradicalrevision, as distinct from a non-radical, reformist revision
can and should he based, and finally, by concretely defining the nature of this
revision from the standpoint of the proletariat (which differs essentially from
the general radical standpoint). Practically the programme should have been
developed by taking into account theexperienceof the peasant
movement. Without the experience of a mass— indeed, more than
that—of a nation-wide peasant movement, the programme of the
Social-Democratic Labour Party couldnotbecome concrete; for it would
have been too difficult, if not impossible, on the basis of theoretical
reasoning alone, to define the degree to which capitalist disintegration had
taken place among our peasantry, and to what extent the latter was capable of
bringing about a revolutionary-democratic change.

In4903, when the Second Congress of .our Party adopted the first agrarian
programme of the R.S.D.L.P., we did not yet have such experience as would enable
us to judge the character, breadth, and depth of the peasant movement. The
peasant risings in South Russia in the spring of 1902 remainedsporadic outbursts. One can therefore understand the restraint shown by the
Social-Democrats in drafting the agrarian programme: it is not the
proletariat’s business to “devise” such a programme for
bourgeois society, and the extent to which the peasant movement against the
survivals of serfdom, a movement worthy of proletarian support, was likely
to develop was still unknown.

The1903 programme attempts to define concretely the nature and
terms. of the “revision” about which the Social-Democrats in 1885
spoke only in a general way. That at tempt—in the main item of the
programme, dealing with the cut-off lands—was based upon a tentative
distinction between lands which serve for exploitation by means of serfdom
and bondage (“lands ‘cut off’ in 1861”) and lands which are
exploited in a capitalist manner. Such a tentative distinction was quite
fallacious, because, in practice, the peasant mass movement could not be
directed against particular categories of landlord estates, but only
against landlordism in general. The programme of 1903raiseda
question which had not yet been raised in 1885, namely, the question of the
conflict of interests between the peasants and the landlords at the moment
of the revision of agrarian relations, which all Social-Democrats regarded
as inevitable. But the solution given to this question in the programme of
1903 is not correct, for, instead of contraposing the consistently peasant
to the consistently Junker method of carrying out the bourgeois revolution,
the programme artificially sets up something intermediate. Here, too, we
must make allowance for the fact that the absence of an open mass movement
at that time made it impossible to solve this question on the basis of
precise data, and not on the basis of phrases, or innocent wishes, or
petty-bourgeois utopias, as the Socialist-Revolutionaries did. No one could
say in advance with certainty to what extent disintegration among the
peasantry had progressed as a result of the partial transition of the
landlords from the labour-service system to wage-labour. No one could
estimate how large was the stratum of agricultural labourers which had
arisen after the Reform of 1861 and to what extent their interests had
become separated from those of the ruined peasant masses.

Atall events, the fundamental mistake in the agrarian programme of 1903
was the absence of a clear idea of the issue around which the agrarian
struggle could and should develop in the process of the bourgeois
revolution in Russia—a clear idea of thetypesof
capitalist agrarian evolution that were objectively possible as the result
of the victory of one or other of the social forces engaged in this
struggle.

[1]Seepresent edition, Vol. 10, pp. 169-74.—Ed.